With the death of Jacques Enguerrand Gourgue in 1996, Haiti lost one of its leading modern painters. The son of a French psychiatrist and a Haitian woman, said to be a "mambo"
(Vodou priestess), his creativity surfaced early. He joined the
Centre d'Art in 1947 at the age of 17. That year he completed
"The Magic Table", now a part of the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art.His visual vocabulary includes the mountains of Haiti, skeletal trees, peasants and their huts, and all the accoutrements of Vodou. By juxtaposing familiar objects in surprising ways, he creates a surrealist style that invites the viewer to meet him on the level of the subconscious, giving free reign to emotion and fantasy.